by Ben Hewitt
It was through this accounting that I fully and finally began to understand how it was that Erik viewed himself as being not frugal but rather downright rich. Because he views assessments of his prosperity in much the same way he views his economy: as being about more than money. He doesn’t have many of the things money can buy, that much is irrefutably true. He has no car, no iPad, no television or cell phone. His life is bereft of anonymous goods, purchased with anonymous dollars, created by hands made anonymous by distance and cultural divides. In this regard, he is poor and, to the extent that one views these goods as desirable and even essential, perhaps even pitiable.
But the more time I spent with Erik, the better I understood that any measure of prosperity based on the compiling of generic goods, no matter how technologically alluring or promising of convenience and comfort, was at best an example of half-done math. The world is awash in these homogenized items; the prosperity that comes of owning them is a homogenized prosperity, no amount of which can fill that void that comes of the disquieting realization that perhaps we are becoming homogenous, too.
The allure of these manufactured goods is built on story after story. First, and almost always, the once-upon-a-time story that they will somehow free us to live the life we truly want to live, a life that always seems just beyond our reach, like the rainbow’s end, or the proverbial carrot on a stick. Often, this story is rooted in the premise that contemporary technological marvels—faster computers, talking cell phones, wireless freakin’ everything—will not only simplify our lives, leaving us with more free time to spend with loved ones or engage in the leisure time activity of our choosing, but will usher in a new era of abundance for all. Increasingly, however, the leisure time activity of our choosing seems to be engaging with the very technological marvels that promise more leisure time. In 2010, Americans set a record for television watching, at 34 hours per week; that same year, a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that teenagers spent 53 hours each week immersed in digital media. A new generation is already on the hook.
In their New York Times best-selling book Abundance: The Future Is Better than You Think, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler repeat the tired refrain that technology is poised to somehow do what it has time and again proven incapable of doing: lift all boats.
There are the very poorest of the poor, the so-called bottom billion, who are finally plugging into the global economy and are poised to become what I call “the rising billion.” The creation of the global transportation network was the initial step down this path, but it’s the combination of the Internet, microfinance, and wireless communication technology that’s transforming the poorest of the poor into an emerging market force. Acting alone, each of these three forces has enormous potential. But acting together, amplified by exponentially growing technologies, the once-unimaginable becomes the now actually possible.
It’s a seductive notion, I’ll give them that, but if the current state of income and asset wealth inequality on both national and global scales hasn’t put to rest the notion that digitized technology cannot and will not be a vector for ubiquitous prosperity, it’s hard to image what will finally expose this sham for what it is: a thinly veiled “opportunity” for industry to continue producing and selling us stuff we don’t need. Diamandis and Kotler’s rosy assessment even hints at such, as evidenced by the phrase: “transform the poorest of the poor into an emerging market force.” Of course, this is the sad and self-centered language of the unconscious economy, in its tireless quest to convert us into a world of consumers.
The second story told by the allure of homogenized products that proliferate in 21st-century markets is even more ironic: that they are precisely the opposite of homogenous, providing a blank canvas on which we might express our individuality. The consumer marketplace is awash with examples: IKEA suggests we “customize” our homes, via the purchase and installation of their assembly-line particleboard wares, which the company churns out in great confidence by the millions, having utilized extensive market research to determine what designs and features are most likely to appeal to the greatest number of consumers. And Apple, a company founded on the notion of creative individualism (“think different”), brings us the ethereal, digitized Siri, whose engineered voice sounds as if the poor girl is being whacked on the head repeatedly as she speaks.
With Siri, even our conversations can be homogenized. After watching an Apple-produced online video touting her robotic charms, I found myself wondering if perhaps I’d stumbled across a parody. What I saw was both disturbing and, it must be said, rather hilarious, if only for its pathos: well-groomed thirty-somethings talking to their telephones and then patiently awaiting Siri’s stilted reply. Here is an actual “conversation” from the video I viewed:
SIRI: New notification for messages. Sandy Cheng. Are we still on for. Dinner to. Night?
WELL-GROOMED THIRTY-SOMETHING: Reply: Sure, I’ll be there.
SIRI: Here’s your reply to Sandy Cheng: Sure. I’ll be. There.
WGTS (SMILING): Send.
Are you kidding me?!? This is progress? This is what folks camped out on sidewalks for? So they could be among the first to tell a machine what to tell a person, and then listen back to what they told “her” to tell that person, before telling “her” to actually go ahead and tell that person what they wish to tell them? Are we truly so lacking in reverence for one another that we wish for our relationships to be mediated by a computer-generated entity that, no matter what it’s saying and to whom, sounds Pre. Cisely the same? Siri is the Special Sauce of communication: predictable, hollowly satisfying, and never deviating from the standard. She represents the antithesis of individuality and autonomy.38
In contrast, practically everything Erik surrounds himself with—his wealth—was anything but homogeneous. It is rooted in personal relationship, trust, and face-to-face communications. It isn’t that he eschews technology in its entirety; hell, he even has an e-mail account, though he doesn’t seem to use it much. But he has contracted neither his wealth nor his relationships (which of course are a constituent part of his wealth) to entities beyond the reach of his control. There is very little in his life that can be made obsolete by a new model; his wealth is largely independent of policy and world affairs over which he has little bearing. This explains in large part why he’d been able to remain so sanguine throughout the 2008 financial crisis: It simply wasn’t part of his world, at least not to the extent that it was and still is for most Americans.
This is not to suggest that Erik is accountable to nothing. It’s just that the things he is accountable to remain primarily within his sphere of influence. His prosperity demands that he uphold his end of multiple unspoken agreements that backstop the exchanges that make his life work; it demands responsibility and accountability and he accepts these things willingly, not just because he has to, but also because he wants to. Because—surprise, surprise—it actually feels good to take responsibility, not only for ourselves, but for one another.
Over the past century or so, and perhaps longer, we have been taught that to rely on others is to be weak and incapable. The notion that we should be dependent on one another is almost antithetical to contemporary American expectations of autonomy and independence. But in truth it is that autonomy that exploits and, irony of ironies, turns us all into dependents of the very arrangements that profess to offer independence. It exploits our resource base, because it depends on each of us owning the raw materials that enable us to shun one another. But even more profoundly, it exploits us, because it deprives us of the opportunity to experience the richness of interconnectedness and the meaningful relationships it gives rise to. By striving to achieve the American ideal of personal independence, we wind up not just independent, but isolated.
I could see now how completely I’d placed everything out of order. I’d long thought that Erik’s enviable contentment was the result, somehow, of his eschewing money. A symptom of his poverty, if you will. But now I saw
that his monetary poverty was itself a symptom of his having chosen, in fact, an accumulation of wealth that could never be measured in mere dollars, and that furthermore, his contentment arose from a deeper well of prosperity than I’d ever imagined. It was almost as if money was irrelevant to his well-being; he might have money, he might not, but either way, it didn’t really matter all that much.39
In fact, I was beginning to grasp just how profoundly Erik’s wealth was not the result of shunning money, or anything else, really. Indeed, it was precisely the opposite: the inevitable result of embracing that which filled his life with happiness. Of course, this was coupled with the wisdom to differentiate between the hollow, fleeting gratifications offered by the commodity marketplace and the durable, if occasionally inconvenient, satisfaction to which both Eisenstein and Hyde refer.
In simplest terms, Erik was content not because he was poor, but because he was alive. And just as it is naïve to believe that the accumulation of money and commodity assets can buy happiness, it is equally misguided to assume that the nonaccumulation of these things will deliver true wealth. One can simply shun money and be poor if one does not embrace a life that seeks to exchange value for worth.
In other words, it wasn’t so much that I needed to cut back on what I already had; it was that I needed to embrace that which I didn’t. And no amount of money—either lesser or greater—could help make this happen.
* * *
28 Of course, the dynamics of gambling, whereby wins often result in massive, against-all-odds windfalls, mean that gamblers sometimes don’t have a choice to cash in early.
29 This dynamic is quite visibly at play in the current practice of “extend and pretend” at many of our nation’s largest financial institutions. Rather than marking assets to true market value, these institutions have been allowed to value them as if the financial and real estate crashes never happened, in hopes that a recovery will eventually restore them to precrash valuations.
30 If you’re quick with math, you can see that we spend pretty much everything we make. We do have some savings, but most of what might have gone into savings has instead gone toward the retirement of our debt.
31 We got our saw back in perfect condition. Still waiting on the beef, though.
32 Emphasis mine.
33 Here is an important point: A loan is a gift of sorts, so long as the money is lent without the expectation of excess repayment. (Still, I’m waiting for that damn beef!)
34 Come to think of it, we did forget to tell him. Although, last time I checked, Erik was still in possession of his full allotment of fingers and thumbs.
35 He did this every so often—went dumpster diving for food and other essentials—and the riches he uncovered were astounding in their diversity and simple quality. The price stickers on the wrapper of the cheese we were eating suggested it had sold for $19 per pound, and not long after he’d liberated the goat cheese from the dumpster’s dark maw, he showed up at our house with a few sticks of Italian dried sausage, each of which had sold for 12 bucks. He left them with us; I ate a few bites with no small amount of trepidation, but a week later I remained hale and hearty, and so I invited my family to enjoy the remainder of the sausage with me.
36 Now, it is also true that the dollar’s homogeneous nature is precisely what lends it ubiquitous value. Indeed, commodity products must by necessity adhere to a common standard or they can’t be traded on large-scale commodity markets, lest they suffer a crisis of faith in their value. This is true across practically all market segments, from oil, to corn, to cotton, to cars. We expect even our Big Macs to replicate, and we trust that the recipe for the Special Sauce in a New York City McDonald’s is precisely the same recipe that’s used in Los Angeles.
37 Sheep’s wool, and cow manure? Really? Read on, for all will be revealed.
38 It is not that technology is inherently problematic; it is that, like money itself, we have allowed technology to exceed appropriate boundaries to the point where it does not merely enhance our lives and connections with others, but defines them.
39 I say “almost” because, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, Erik does need money. He just needs it a whole heck of a lot less than most of us.
[ CHAPTER NINE ]
IN WHICH I HAVE DOUBTS.
ON THE last day of November 2011, almost exactly a year after my initial visit to Erik’s cabin, I returned to the structure. It wasn’t the first time I’d visited since the previous November, but it was notable for numerous reasons. For one, it had been the second-warmest autumn on record, and the day was almost freakishly balmy. A few stubborn patches of slush lay in the wooded, north-facing shadows, the week-old remnants of a storm that had dropped nearly a foot of wet snow. But that event had been anomalous, and a string of 50°F and 60°F days had quickly erased all but the most passing evidence that it had happened at all. Still, there was another, more consequential reason that this visit was so different from the one a year before: Erik no longer lived in his house. Indeed, it seemed that the circumstances of his life had changed rather dramatically in just a few short months.
Most profoundly, his girlfriend, Heidi, had found a house she wished to purchase. This had happened in a manner so unscripted, so counter to the way most Americans go about achieving these sorts of milestones, that I couldn’t help but feel as if she had somehow been fated to inhabit this particular, and no other, home. To begin, the house she found hadn’t even been for sale, a basic prerequisite of eligibility that had not deterred Heidi in the least. Instead, she’d simply knocked on the weather-beaten front door and stated her keen interest in purchasing the place if the owner ever decided to sell. I suspect that even Heidi thought she’d be turned away, but such was not the case: “You know,” said the owner, “perhaps I would like to sell.”
There were still some kinks to work out, chief among them that Heidi had no credit history (a few years before, she’d procured a Visa card in order to establish her creditworthiness but had found using it distasteful and had abandoned it before any pattern of repayment had been established). So for the time being, while the bank figured out what to do with her, Heidi was renting the house, and Erik had moved in with her. So too had Erik’s younger brother, Ryan, who’d graduated from Saint Lawrence University in the spring and had come to Vermont to consider his future.
The house was small, and humbly funky, with lots of exposed wood, both inside and out. There was nothing to hide where this house had come from; everything whispered of its origins. The unpainted wood looked, well, like wood, and if one were to run fingers over the rough surface of, say, the house’s siding or its window trim, the boards actually felt like a tree beneath the fingers. Heck, the place even smelled like a tree. There were cracks and gaps everywhere, including between the upstairs floorboards, so that anything spilled might drip down onto the heads of those below.
The house sat on 2½ acres, pushed against a steep, forested hillside, into which a root cellar would be dug and, perhaps, a few pigs would be kept. There was a garden, and a listing outbuilding, and small parking area for Heidi’s little Toyota pickup and the old station wagon that Ryan had purchased and to which Erik had been granted seemingly unrestricted access. I’d been surprised, the first time I’d ridden as a passenger in the car, at how heedlessly Erik drove. But then I realized he was merely allowing the car to generate as much momentum on the descents as possible, so that he might slingshot up the next rise using the minimum amount of fuel. Still, the first time I rode with him he misjudged the car’s braking power relative to a looming stop sign, and we’d skidded to a screeching halt. This version of Erik, stomping on the brake pedal so willfully as to leave four thick black strips of rubber on the tarmac, was so opposed to my entrenched view of him as a man who conducted himself with utter mindfulness, with the utmost respect for the natural world, that I’d nearly broken into laughter, forgetting for a moment that he’d almost blasted into a busy intersection.
So yes, Heidi’s house w
as small and funky (although nowhere near as small as Erik’s cabin, and nowhere near as funky as the rental he’d inhabited before building his place), but it still represented a fairly significant vertical rise in Erik’s standard of living. He hadn’t climbed a mere single rung on the ladder; he’d skipped over a good three or four, to a vantage point that offered an exquisite view of life with electricity, a flush toilet, and refrigeration. They were even shopping for a chest freezer, albeit a used one. There was rent to pay and, assuming Heidi could navigate the lending process, there would soon be a mortgage to service (“death pledge” is what Erik repeatedly called it, referring to the original French law meaning of the word, an apparent reference to the fact that the agreement dies only when the obligation is fulfilled or the property is foreclosed on), along with the requisite homeowner’s insurance and annual property tax bill. Erik still didn’t own a car of his own, of course, but between Heidi’s truck and Ryan’s little runabout, he may as well have.